from kurt nimmo: Don’t like the idea of the government walking with muddy shoes all over the Fourth Amendment and snooping your telephone calls, reading your email, rifling through credit and medical records? Well, obviously, you’re a conspiracy nut. Because the government loves you, it would never disrespect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The NSA, CIA, DHS, FBI, etc., are only looking for Osama, al-Qaeda, and more recently the white boy variant of al-Qaeda, under beds everywhere, plotting your demise because they hate your freedom to shop until you drop.
Doubt it? Check out Sen. Orrin Hatch, neocon from Utah, in the video here, recorded on June 25 while the congress critter professional corporate whore pontificated from the Senate floor.
hatch compares FISA critics to those ‘who wear tin foil hats and think 9/11 was an inside job.’ from thinkprogress: Speaking today on the Senate floor in favor of the Foreign Service Intelligence Act legislation, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) compared critics of the bill - which include Sens. Harry Reid (D-NV), Chris Dodd (D-CT), and Barbara Boxer (D-CA), among others — to deluded conspiracy theorists. Hatch mocked the what he called “onerous oversight provisions” included in the bill, and said those who raise the specter of unchecked executive wiretapping power “feed the delusions of those who wear tin foil hats around their house and think that 9/11 was an inside job." Those “onerous” oversight provisions Hatch maligns? A ban on “reverse targeting” of Americans and a new requirement of probable cause for surveillance of Americans abroad.
update: Late this afternoon, the Senate voted 80-15 to invoke cloture on the FISA bill. Ian Welsh at FDL writes that this "was the real vote" and applauds the 15 senators who "voted for the Bill of Rights."
from larry chin: On Wednesday, the US Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation permitting government spying, including giving immunity to telecommunications companies involved in secret domestic surveillance programs. With the stroke of George W. Bush’s pen, the US is now a police state by definition.
The update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, called the “FISA compromise,” or more appropriately, the “spy bill,” largely completes the triumph of the Bush/Cheney administration and a bipartisan criminal consensus. By convenient design, the FISA revision derails pending lawsuits filed against the Bush administration’s corporate spying partners (AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon), silences (the largely empty-to-begin-with) congressional investigations into the Bush administration’s illegal domestic spying program.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and the Democrats have now moved to silence all discussion about the issue.
olbermann should take obama to task for fisa betrayal from kurt nimmo: Earlier this week, Keith Olbermann complained about FISA and the Justice Department’s proposed changes on domestic snooping. It was nice to hear Olbermann excoriate the government for creating an "embryonic police state," never mind this sucker is beyond gestation and growing in our midst like a tenacious weed...
Olbermann showed his real colors. He said the next president — assumed to be Obama, as Olbermann is a Democrat — will be saddled with Bush’s intelligence "embryo." Keith made it sound like Obama disapproves and the already long established and well developed snoop state apparatus will be a yoke around his neck. In fact, Obama voted in the Senate for the current FISA bill, to the chagrin of no shortage of Democrats, many now finally coming around and realizing there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and if you turn ‘em upside down they all look alike.
Under Democrat Lyndon Johnson, the snoop state flourished, from COINTELPRO to the CIA’s Operation CHAOS and beyond. "At this time, there was an impression given to the intelligence community of ‘get the job done’ regardless of the methods," writes Major Kevin G. Donaleski, USMC.
congress votes to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, legalize warrantless eavesdropping from salon: The Democratic-led Congress this afternoon voted to put an end to the NSA spying scandal, as the Senate approved a bill — approved last week by the House — to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, terminate all pending lawsuits against them, and vest whole new warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President. The vote in favor of the new FISA bill was 69-28. Barack Obama joined every Senate Republican (and every House Republican other than one) by voting in favor of it, while his now-vanquished primary rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, voted against it. John McCain wasn’t present for any of the votes, but shared Obama’s support for the bill. The bill will now be sent to an extremely happy George Bush, who already announced that he enthusiastically supports it, and he will sign it into law very shortly.
update: bush signs fisa bill, aclu sues from threat level: The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Thursday over a controversial wiretapping law, challenging the constitutionality of the expanded spy powers Congress granted to the president on Wednesday. The federal lawsuit was filed with the court just hours after Bush signed the bill into law. The ACLU is suing on behalf of journalist and human rights groups, asking the court put a halt to Congress's legalization of Bush's formerly secret warrantless wiretapping program. The ACLU contends (.pdf) the expanded spying power violates the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
• The “roving wiretap” provision allows the FBI to obtain wiretaps from a secret intelligence court, known as the FISA court (for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), without identifying the target or what method of communication is to be tapped.
• The “lone wolf” measure allows FISA court warrants for the electronic monitoring of a person for whatever reason — even without showing that the suspect is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. The government has said it has never invoked that provision, but the Obama administration said it wanted to retain the authority to do so.
• The “business records” provision allows FISA court warrants for any type of record, from banking to library to medical, without the government having to declare that the information sought is connected to a terrorism or espionage investigation.
contradiction on spy satellite shootdown explanation from usnews: When the Pentagon ordered a Navy ship to shoot down a crippled U.S. spy satellite last February, it claimed the operation was necessary to prevent a harmful fuel from being dispersed in the atmosphere. At the time, critics charged that the Bush administration was using the toxic fuel as an excuse to demonstrate missile-defense and antisatellite capabilities.
Astrophysicist Yousaf Butt obtained U.S. government documents showing that NASA's own analysis concluded that the satellite's fuel tank was expected to burn up completely during re-entry—even though NASA probably overestimated the tank's chances of survival. "Despite its optimistic oversimplifications, the released study indicates that the tank would certainly have demised high up in the atmosphere," Butt, a staff scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, writes in an article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Up to now, U.S. officials had refused to release any of the prelaunch analyses regarding the fuel tank, claiming they contained sensitive information. But Butt says that the newly released documents clearly contradict the official explanation for the shoot-down, which was seen at the time as provocative and risky.
But just in time for a new administration (and the bundles of cash always at the ready for the expanding homeland security market), comes a complete "surveillance in a box" system called the Intelligence Platform!
According to New Scientist, German electronics giant Siemens has developed software allegedly capable of integrating "...tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs 'intelligence modules'." New Scientist reports that the firm has sold the system to some 60 countries in Europe and Asia. Which countries? Well, Siemens won't say.
gore vidal: US never had democracy from press tv: American essayist Gore Vidal says that despite the US claim that it is making the world safer by perpetuating democracy, the country never had any democracy.
In an exclusive interview with Press Tv correspondent, Vidal said that the United States has never had democracy and the word never was used in the US constitution, Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence.
Vidal also said that America has fallen into the hands of a small group of people that only care about global dominance and making money from US tax payers by waging wars.
from thinkprogress: Under a “compromise” wiretapping bill the House is expected to approve tomorrow, U.S. phone companies that cooperated with President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program after Sept. 11 “could be shielded from lawsuits” as long as “there is written certification that the White House asked a phone company to participate and assured it” of the program’s legality. However, as critics of the deal have noted, there isn’t much to the bill that constitutes a “compromise”:
– Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI): “The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation... Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity.”
– Marcy Wheeler: “All it takes to get off scott free, in this bill, is for the President to have said the program was legal, regardless of whether it was or…whether the telecoms should have questioned whether the directives were legal.”
– Glenn Greenwald: “[W]e’ll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it — the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.”
Referring to the bill’s text, Greenwald added, “Seeing the words in print, though, adds a new dimension to appreciating just how corrupt and repugnant this is.”
US electoral system warned it 'can't cope' as historic number of voters cast their ballot from daily mail: The American presidential election could descend into electoral chaos on Tuesday as unprecedented numbers of voters turn out to cast their ballot in a system that is largely untested. The U.S. has an electoral system that is not organised, designed or funded to cope with 'anywhere near a 100 per cent turnout', a director of a leading independent electoral reform group has said. As an estimated 130million Americans head to the polls, Doug Chapin, director of The Pew Charitable Trust's Electionline.org, said voter turnout will 'dwarf' all other problems in this year's presidential election.
scarborough: 'ghost in the machine' could upset obama victory from raw story: In a little-noticed comment over the weekend, MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough said Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) had two things to fear - complacency by supporters given his wide lead in the polls, and a "ghost in the machine." "Polls are getting hard to read at this point," MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski remarked on Sunday's edition of Morning Joe.
obama & mccain belong in the hague, not the white house from daily dose of terror: The naivete and idiocy of the American public knows no lows. To think that millions will still go into polling stations, where there is no transparency, no paper ballots and 8 years of proven election fraud, is beyond an exercise in futility, it's deep denial - The denial that America died years ago. Do people not know that we had a coup d'etat on 9/11 in 2001? How could "elections" be even considered when the entire U.S. Government has been operating as a criminal enterprise? Boycott the staged elections (scripted pro-wrestling for pseudo intellectuals) and pursue direct action against the traitors to humanity parading around as decent Americans.
obama's grandmother dies of cancer in hawaii from dpa: Barack Obama's grandmother, who helped raise the Democratic presidential candidate in Hawaii, passed away Monday after a prolonged battle with cancer. Madelyn Dunham, 85, had been gravely ill for weeks, prompting Obama to interrupt his campaign for a few days last month to visit her in Honolulu, Hawaii. 'She was the cornerstone of our family and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength and humility,' read a statement from Obama and his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. 'Our debt to her is beyond measure.' The news of Dunham's passing comes just one day before the US presidential election, which has Obama holding a significant lead over Republican rival John McCain.
last american birth 'witness' dead day before election from total411: Madelyn Dunham was probably falsely listed a witness on a fraudulent registration of home birth made contemporaneously by Barry's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. As Stanley Ann had been an Hawaii resident for less than twelve months, she would not have have been allowed to register a foreign birth at all. The deception at the time was for the purpose not of establishing natural-born American citizenship, but for mere Hawaii citizenship! The never-seen and little-heard Madelyn Dunham has been announced dead today. As Obama's communist-sympathizer American grandmother, she was the last living American to have been intimately and contemporaneously acquainted with the circumstances of the birth and conception of Barack Hussein Obama II. Several cases, including a pending writ of certiorari at the Supreme Court of the United States, are challenging Obama's claims to being a "natural born" citizen of these United States.
alan keyes' vp candidate sues obama on birth cert from people's passions: Vice-presidential Candidate Wiley S. Drake Sr. to file in court asking to de-certify Barack Obama because he has refused to release proof of being a natural-born citizen, thereby disqualifying Obama in his bid for the Office of President. The recent lawsuit in Washington State demanding their Secretary of State to vet the citizenship credentials of Barack Obama has spawned a slew of similar suits with new lawsuits filed and/or prepared in WA, FL, NC, CO, CA, OH, FL, CT, GA, TX, MI. Related lawsuits HI, US District.
top obama advisor has long ties to neocons from ipsnews: With the 2008 presidential campaign at its end, pundits have begun to discuss in earnest what expected winner Barack Obama's administration might look like. An important piece of evidence is Obama's campaign team, which largely escaped the harsh scrutiny that his opponent's lobbyist-laden team received. Because of Obama's relative inexperience on foreign policy, it is this part of his team that is getting much of the attention, and one adviser in particular - Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's Mideast envoy whose record includes supporting the pro-Iraq War advocacy campaigns of the Project for the New American Century and serving as a consultant to theWashington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a bastion of Israel-centric policy thinking in Washington.
i’m sorry, i won’t be voting for obama from gnn: It pains me to say that I cannot vote with history. I will not be able to say to my children that I voted for the first Black president like many of you will. My vote is much too sacred to me to give to a man I cannot trust.
I will not be voting for Barack Obama or his opponent Republican John McCain. I frankly don’t know who I’ll be pulling the lever for.
History, hope and the buzzword ‘change,’ these are not reasons to vote for a president, especially not in a time such as now.
During his primary campaign Barack Obama claimed that he would listen to his supporters. He claimed that he would filibuster FISA (immunity for Wiretappers) and when the time came to fight, he didn’t even show up. This was his moment to win me over. This was his High Noon in the capitol rotunda, but in this feature Gary Cooper didn’t even show up.
At that moment, and many others throughout the campaign I saw Obama for who he was, just another frightened politician who when given a moment to show his true colors exposed himself to be yellow. I’m tired of these leaders, Democrat and Republican. They play on real people’s hopes and fears and use them for their own political ambition.
Obama has caught the moment, he’ll win tomorrow, probably by a landslide. Our hope for a great leader, I guess, is once again out-shined by the reality of “good-enough.” President Obama will continue the war in Afghanistan, continue NAFTA and CAFTA. All the while we will continue to kindly ask our dear great leader to listen to us. It will be a democracy, as we’ve had for decades, maybe a bit closer to our hopes but still mostly kept for our dreams.
and obama's "civilian national security force" is coming soon...
from youtube: It’s not about left, right, conservatives, liberals, or any other manifestation of the false left-right paradigm, so often employed this election season. It’s about the New World Order and the blossoming of a police state under the “perfect master,” nothing more than window dressing for repression and dictatorship. Since Obama is a black man, and the nation is steeped in three decades of political correctness, it will be impossible to oppose him. Lest we do, we may very well face his “civilian national security force.” Fascism always looks pretty much the same, no matter the era or country.
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from kurt nimmo: Don’t like the idea of the government walking with muddy shoes all over the Fourth Amendment and snooping your telephone calls, reading your email, rifling through credit and medical records? Well, obviously, you’re a conspiracy nut. Because the government loves you, it would never disrespect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The NSA, CIA, DHS, FBI, etc., are only looking for Osama, al-Qaeda, and more recently the white boy variant of al-Qaeda, under beds everywhere, plotting your demise because they hate your freedom to shop until you drop.
